


Before The Bullshit

by MZS



Series: This Whole I'm Not Worthy Of Love Bullshit [2]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Dubious Consent, Enemies to Friends, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich, Explicit Language, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mexican Drug Cartel, Mickey Milkovich Loves Ian Gallagher, Mickey Milkovich Misses Ian Gallagher, Mickey Milkovich in Mexico, Non Romantic Friendship, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Not Canon Compliant, Prison Blow Job, Prostitution, Recreational Drug Use, The Story Comes Full Circle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:02:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27599299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MZS/pseuds/MZS
Summary: A dark look at Mickey's life in Mexico before his endgame reunion with Ian.
Relationships: Ian Gallagher & Mickey Milkovich, Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich
Series: This Whole I'm Not Worthy Of Love Bullshit [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2017708
Comments: 48
Kudos: 47





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a multi-chapter prequel to [This Whole I'm Not Worthy of Love Bullshit.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25809262?view_full_work=true) Although not a main character from the start, Ian will appear, and is the driver of the entire story. This narrative focuses on the friendship Mickey makes with the boldly unlikable, rich-dick caricature named Paolo we meet in the original story (nothing sexual or even romantic, I promise), and as such, the tale ultimately serves as a bittersweet love letter to Ian. Mickey is smart and resourceful but in a lot of pain and that tension is explored here, through what I imagine his life could've been like in Mexico, as he carves a path back to Ian, with an unlikely ally watching out for him every step of the way.

“So,” Paolo sighs, then drags deeply on his cigarette, “looks like I’m stuck babysitting the gringo. Emphasis on the word ‘baby,’ apparently.”

“Fuck off,” Mickey garbles back through the fabric covering his face, which inflates slightly on his exhale. His jeans are wet, causing him to shift uncomfortably in his chair, and there’s pool of urine puddled on the dirt floor beneath him.

“What was that? Not sure I heard you,” Paolo tears the blindfold off his head, slightly unprepared for the vision that is Mickey Milkovich to reveal itself beneath the veil of thick black fabric. He sniffs, hesitates for a second, then gets right up in Mickey’s face.

“You put two of our best men out of commission, robbed a safe house and set fire to a stash worth at least 20k on the street. Curious as to why you find yourself still breathing?”

Mickey squints against the room’s dim light, hoping his expression doesn’t betray the relief he feels at finally being spoken to in English.

He gives his surroundings a quick glance. There aren’t any windows except for a small transom above an old, heavily reinforced door and the only light comes from an exposed bulb hanging from the ceiling. It’s dank, like the cellar of an old house and completely empty except for a few pieces of rickety furniture.

The last thing he remembers with any clarity is stepping out to buy a carton of smokes before getting jumped and dragged into the back of an SUV. Of course, the ambush came as no surprise to Mickey, who knew full well when he arrived in San Miguel weeks ago that he was treading on dangerous ground. He was being reckless and impulsive and considering the risks he was taking, downright suicidal. It was a just matter of time before the presiding cartel got wind of the trespassing gringo in their midst and now, here he was. An irksome problem getting expediently dealt with — although how the pretty boy hovering over him factors in, he isn’t quite sure. 

Paolo kicks hard at the leg of Mickey’s chair, prompting the brunette to look him in the eye and finally speak.

“Yeah, okay, Menudo. You bein’ paid to interpret or intimidate?” Mickey asks with a shrug. “’Cause if the cartel gets WiFi down here and figures out how to use Google Translate, then there the fuck go your career prospects.”

Paolo raises an eyebrow at Mickey who returns his look with a blank stare, then snorts impatiently as if wishing Paolo would skip the bullshit preamble and get to the point already.

“True. Your Spanish is for shit,” Paolo fights back an amused smile as he murmurs around his cigarette. “But the guys tell me you threw an interesting phrase together. ‘ _Seré tu hombre adentro._ ’ It’s the reason they brought you here instead of ending you right on the spot.” He blows a puff of smoke into Mickey’s face. “Whaddyu mean by that?”

“Exactly what it fucking sounded like,” Mickey replies, tugging against the ropes binding his wrists.

Paolo nods, rests his cigarette in an ashtray and leaves the room. When he returns, it’s with a pair of stone-faced thugs, one of whom pulls out a knife and comes at Mickey. He braces for the slice of the blade, but it doesn’t strike and instead, he feels the rope loosen from around one of his wrists. Paolo’s suddenly grabbing roughly at Mickey’s free hand, turning it over and glaring at the tattoos on his fingers.

“You’re a Milkovich,” he says coolly, before shoving Mickey’s hand away.

Well shit. Wouldn’t be the first time his family’s reputation preceded him, although whether this meant a swifter or more painful death for Mickey remained to be seen.

“Milkoviches are legendary. Real earners,” Paolo muses, then apparently translates the phrase into Spanish because by the time he’s done talking, the men are nodding their heads.

He flicks his cigarette to the ground, smirks when it hisses in the piss puddle at Mickey’s feet.

“But see, everyone knows your lowlife family runs guns for Sinaloa, which leads me to wonder. What could _possibly_ bring a grubby little Milkovich such as yourself _all_ the way out here?”

Mickey shrugs without answering the question. What could he tell him? That he was taking stupid risks because his life had no meaning? That no amount of white sand, tequila, easy money or free sex could distract him from the ungrateful self-involved prick who broke his heart, so he was chasing thrills that held the promise of a swift end to his misery?

He looks down and clicks his tongue after a long stretch of silence. “You lookin’ for an inside man, or not?”

“How do we know you’re not playing us right now?”

“You don’t.”

“So, what’s stopping one of these guys from gutting you right here?” Paolo motions to the men standing beside him who’ve been silently watching the exchange.

“If they do, it’s another body to bury. If they don’t… if the Gulf Cartel lets me straddle both sides, well,” Mickey tips his head with a confidence he’s not actually feeling, “then they got someone to call on when the time comes to cash in a favor… feed ’em information when they need it, give ’em the upper hand in a land war if it should ever come to that.”

Paolo squints as he studies the brunette seated in front of him, then nods in his direction.

“You’d turn on your crew so easily?”

“You mean the dirtbag _pandejos_ who throw me nothing but scraps. I don’t owe ’em shit.”

“Yet you expect me to believe you’d somehow be loyal to _us_ ,” Paolo taunts. “How exactly does that work?”

Mickey shakes his head, unsure if he even _wants_ to convince the cartel’s fuckboy interpreter to take him at his word. Ordinarily, he’d be scrapping and bullshitting and finagling his way out of a desperate situation like this, but in the moment, and for reasons he obviously couldn’t disclose, Mickey wonders if it’s even worth trying.

“I’m a dead man either way, right? Take the offer or don’t. I could give a fuck.”

The men deliberate amongst themselves, muttering in mocking tones and repeatedly tossing the words _el chucho_ about, as they dart significant glances Mickey’s way. Using his newly freed hand, Mickey reaches down to steady his knee which he hopes no one notices is trembling.

“I gotta tell you honestly, Milkovich,” Paolo finally begins, as casually as if he was discussing the weather. “If it was up to me, I’d send you back to your handlers in pieces. But for some reason, these gentlemen seem to wanna keep you as the family pet.”

Mickey rolls his eyes at Paolo, despite the way he all of a sudden seems bigger and somehow more menacing as he shifts his weight forward.

“So, here’s how it’s gonna be,” Paolo rubs his hands together before spreading them apart in a gesture of resignation. “We’ll let you get back to your every day, small-time bullshit. Running guns, doing your collections, shaking down the local mom-n-pops. That you’ll continue to do strictly for show.”

He crouches in front of Mickey, stares coldly into his eyes. “You wanna be our ‘inside man?’ Our undercover C.I. stoolie, or whatever the fuck you prefer to call yourself? Fine. Just know that we own you. Not Sinaloa. You answer to us now.”

Mickey’s response is to feign a bored expression.

“We catch wind of you dicking us over or stirring up any more trouble _here_ in San Miguel? _Our_ fucking territory? You’re done. One day, you’ll just cease to exist. No warnings.”

To emphasize the point, one of the men says, _“lo entendienes, chucho?”_ then grabs Mickey’s face hard, ignoring his grimace of pain when he presses Mickey’s cheeks together. 

Seemingly satisfied that the message has been received, Paolo straightens up and smiles broadly. He instructs one cartel member to cut the remaining rope from Mickey’s bound wrist while the other leaves the room and returns with a pair of sweatpants that he drops in Mickey’s lap.

“Clean yourself up for the ride home. It’s a new car and… can’t exactly have you fucking up the leather interior.” Paolo rakes his eyes over Mickey who by now has risen unsteadily to his feet. “Don’t worry… we’ll get you housebroken you soon enough.”

He swings open a door to an adjoining bathroom and with a smirk nudges Mickey through it. Shrugging off the unwelcome touch, Mickey shuts the door behind himself and grimaces as he peels off his damp jeans, followed by his soaked boxers and flings them both to the ground.

Jesus, fuck. He _did not_ piss himself out of fear. He fucking didn’t. Downing half a six-pack of Modelo before taking a hard jab to the kidney, then being denied the use of a bathroom for fuck knows how long is _clearly_ what’s led to this embarrassing loss of bladder control. At least that’s what Mickey tells himself as he presses his forehead to the mirror and slumps over the sink in a boneless heap.

Of course, he blamed Ian Gallagher for _all_ of this. It was extraordinary how Mickey could trace every one of his shitty decisions and misguided acts of love and loyalty back to the one person he knew could never fully appreciate _any_ of it.

It was just over a year ago that Ian deserted him in an agonizing goodbye at the Del Rio border crossing into Mexico and what followed was a blur: gun running, street brawling, small-time trafficking and dealing, whereby Mickey snorted nearly as much product as he pushed. He drank too much, buried his dick in almost anything — male, female, it didn’t matter which, so long as the payoff was Ian’s ouster from his head for a fucking night.

Still, none of it made a bit of difference. Mickey was alone and wrecked and overcome with a pain so acute, it wouldn’t dissipate or drift away, but instead worsened as time went on. It’s what ultimately led him to San Miguel de Allende in the first place. It was an old town rife with old money, where he’d resigned himself to accepting one of two fates: either scoring big here with a major heist after which he’d go off the grid completely or else he’d just go down in some magnificent blaze-of-glory shit. What he hadn’t counted on, of course, was his ill-timed sense of survivalism kicking in so that he was now completely fucked and blood-bound to two rival crime families.

Mickey clears his throat, rubs a hand pensively over his lower lip. A few deep, steadying breaths later, he changes before emerging from the bathroom to find Paolo leaning against the wall opposite, holding a cellphone.

“By the way,” he sighs exaggeratedly and pushes off the wall so he can loom over Mickey. “You’re wrong on two counts. WiFi, we have,” he nods to a router, barely visible in a dark corner of the room, which makes Mickey snort.

“Second. My job security?” Paolo shakes his head. “Not much of an issue there, either.” Offering no further explanation on the matter, he simply tosses the phone to Mickey, who fumbles slightly before catching it against his chest.

“Only number programmed in there is mine. I’ll be expecting daily check-ins.”

Mickey turns the thing over in his hands carefully, as if fearing it might detonate, which considering his circumstances doesn’t seem all that implausible. He barely gets a chance to pocket the thing before the henchmen surround him from either side and hustle him roughly through the reinforced door and outside onto a driveway. His feels his eyes burn from the sun’s glare and his sneakers crunch over the gravel beneath them, and in the next moment, a hard shove as he’s flung headfirst into the backseat of the cartel’s SUV.

For the first time that day, Mickey can see the house where he’d just spent who knows how many hours, a huge colonial mansion surrounded by acres of manicured green lawn. He catches little more than a glimpse of it before Paolo’s hovering over him again, blocking his field of vision.

“Don’t go off the grid,” he warns, resting an arm on the car’s open door and kicking idly into the gravel. “Not unless you want things to get a lot more unpleasant for you.”

Mickey rolls his eyes and settles into the soft leather of the back seat. “Whatever, tough guy. You got a name?”

“Yeah, Milkovich, I got a name.” Paolo dips his head and looks away, his mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Do your research next time.” And with that, he slams the door shut and stalks off back toward the house.

The cartel members climb into the front and the SUV revs up and peels out with a screech and the sound of gravel churning beneath its tires.

As the car picks up speed, Mickey retrieves the phone from his pocket and finds that true to his word, Paolo programmed only one contact in it. No names, no pictures in the camera roll. He clicks his tongue.

So, who exactly the fuck are you, Rico Suave — because research, Mickey did plenty. He knew that San Miguel de Allende was controlled almost entirely by the Gulf Cartel and a few other minor outfits, all of which had a bitter, longstanding rivalry with Sinaloa. He knew that the police presence was trivial here, which boded well for Mickey because as a fugitive, the last thing he needed was to get his ass caught and extradited back to the States. And although Paolo appeared to have the swagger, Mickey _also_ knew there was no way this chiseled, blue-eyed motherfucker could be anyone of real significance in the organization’s chain of command.

There were so many players in the individual territories, including lieutenants, _sicarios_ who ran protection rackets, _narcotraficantes_ who physically moved the shit, not to mention the whole low-ranking salesforce, the civilian lookouts, the informants. All of these guys were on the payroll, and having neither the age nor the grit or the battle scars that came from a life of true gangland savagery, Mickey figured at best, this Paolo was bush leaguer, a mid-level soldier maybe, who made sure commissions made their way back to the higher-ups. What else could explain what he was doing in some huge gated narcomansion that looked like it belonged to the capo himself?

Mickey sucks a shallow breath in through his teeth. He puts the phone away and gazes through the window, trying to orient himself because having been blindfolded and unconscious for most of the journey over, he had no idea where he was.

Finally, after what feels like an hour of driving through parts unknown, familiar sights and landmarks begin creeping into view, indicating that they were getting closer to the town’s center. The car eventually rolls to a stop in the alley behind the store where Mickey’d been ambushed. When the men yank him out of the backseat, he’s still half-expecting two bullets to pierce the back of his skull, but instead, they just send him sprawling violently onto the sidewalk.

He hears the rustle of a plastic bag, and then one suddenly comes sailing at him from the passenger-side window. Inside are his piss-soaked clothes, his housekeys and his wallet.

 _“_ _Animal doméstico,”_ the man snarks, enunciating each word slowly for Mickey’s benefit. He leans forward and spits when Mickey flips him off, then promptly drives away, churning up a dust cloud as the car speeds off through the opposite end of the alley.

Exhausted and disheveled, Mickey gets up slowly, squares his shoulders and runs a hand down his face. Judging by the hunger pangs in his stomach and the stiffness in his back, this was officially the longest day ever and he was more than ready to see it conclude with a half-gallon of José Cuervo and a sandwich from the only nearby _tortaria_ that made it the way he liked.

He heads in the direction of the corner market, a pronounced limp to his gait, goes inside and selects a few items that he dumps beside the register. After grabbing a lighter and a king-size Snickers bar, because yes, it’s been _that_ kind of day, Mickey nods to the carton of cigarettes he’d meant to buy earlier.

He’s just about to pay when he absentmindedly pats his hip in search of cash and instead, feels the cartel-issued cellphone in his pocket. Sharply reminded that there was now a much bigger debt for which he owed remuneration, he shakes his head and sighs, knowing that before all is said and done, it might still see him hanging from the end of a rope. _Jesus fucking Christ._ Reluctantly, Mickey reaches for the display of charger cables on the counter and selects one that’s compatible. After paying, he grabs his shit and begins the slow, painful hobble toward his apartment.


	2. Chapter 2

“Mikhailo Aleksandr Milkovich,” Paolo murmurs to himself as he scans the ‘wanted fugitives’ tab on the FBI’s home page. He clicks on Mickey’s mugshot which takes him to the man’s criminal dossier, a long and colorful record that reads like the plot to a low-budget crime thriller. Convicted for attempted murder by poisoning... wanted for unlawful flight to avoid confinement… local arrest warrant issued… federal arrest warrant issued… believed to have fled the United States…

“Fuckin’ fascinating.”

Just then, the sounds of muffled cursing and squeaking sneaker soles interrupt Paolo’s afternoon of leisurely reading and he promptly shuts the laptop.

“There he is,” he makes his way from behind a large wooden desk and over to where his men have Mickey, arms pinned at his sides and a blindfold over his face. He lifts the hood but doesn’t remove it, letting it billow and rest atop Mickey’s head. 

“Back here already? Feels like it was just yesterday.”

“That’s ’cause it was just yesterday,” Mickey shoots back, wriggling against the henchmen’s iron grip. “The fuck’s with the blindfold again? Not like this place hard to find, plus there’s pictures of it all over the fucking internet.”

“Nice work, Milkovich. What else’ve you managed to uncover with those sharp investigative skills of yours?”

By way of a response, Mickey tries to snicker but it comes out more like a grimace of pain. He’s still sore from his most recent brush with Paolo’s goons and being fucked with like this, even on a good day, is very much beyond his tolerance level.

After gesturing for the men to back off and leave the room, he motions for Mickey to sit down.

“I can assume you know who I am now?” He takes a seat behind the desk and watches as Mickey cautiously settles into the chair opposite.

After yanking the blindfold off and throwing it to the floor, Mickey gives the room a once-over. To call it a stark contrast from the dungeon he’d previously been confined to would be the understatement of the century, brightly lit as it was and decked out entirely in brocade fabrics and antiques. There were grand archways flanked by stone columns and stately oil paintings of landscapes in gilded frames and a huge wine cellar behind a pane of floor-to-ceiling glass. It was as if the duality of the two spaces perfectly epitomized what it meant to be in league with a drug cartel — affluence on one side of the wall, unapologetic barbarity on the other, yet both a part of the same gritty underworld.

“You’re the son of the capo,” Mickey says dryly as Paolo reaches for a pack of cigarettes on his desk, lights up and offers one to Mickey. “Congratulations on winning the genetic lottery. You and Draco Malfoy can start a club.”

“But what would we call ourselves?” Paolo asks around his cigarette, its glowing tip bobbing up and down as he speaks. “’Cause without the right branding, we’d just be a couple of twats with trust funds.”

Mickey rolls his eyes at a smirking Paolo and the two men just sit together for a while, quietly smoking. There was just _something_ about this odd mix of bluster and fatalism that radiated from Mickey, a quality unlike anything Paolo’d ever seen, not in his personal life and certainly never in business. It was one thing when Mickey still thought of him as a low-ranking pleb in the cartel’s pecking order, but to keep this shit going _now_ that he knew better? There was no denying Mickey’s street smarts, but he was operating with a such stunning lack of survival instinct, Paolo couldn’t help but be intrigued.

“There a reason I’m here?” Mickey finally blurts out, his patience at a breaking point. “Supposed to be ‘workin’ my territories,’ remember? Or is this just my first official meeting with narco HR?”

“Now that you mention it,” Paolo sighs and stubs out his cigarette in a crystal ashtray, “I do have some paperwork for you to fill out.” He reaches into a drawer and pulls out a red marker, followed by a map that he flattens out on top of the desk.

“Your crew’s dead drops over the past six months,” he says, passing the marker to Mickey. “All the handoff points for product and cash. Point ’em out for me.”

Mickey crushes his cigarette in the ashtray before making a rough grab for the pen, then gets to work, dotting the map with a constellation of red specks. He explains that the cartel maintains security by varying up its MO depending on the particulars of each location. In some cases, the stashes are hidden within shops used as fronts to launder cash and in others, they’ll just bury the shit out in the desert off some no-man’s-land stretch of highway. Geocaching was yet another method, Mickey tells him, but the GPS coordinates were always encrypted and never disclosed in advance.

“Great. Now the safehouses.” For this, Paolo hands him a yellow highlighter.

Feeling himself waver a bit, Mickey gnaws his lower lip as a crisis of conscience begins to stir within the pit of his stomach. Unlike dead drops which were unmanned, safehouses were full of low-ranking guys paid to oversee large reserves of drugs and weapons. By compromising the location of these hideouts, Mickey was putting a target on the backs of dozens of Sinaloa’s foot soldiers. Even though everyone in the game knew the stakes and lived by the same grim code of conduct, it didn’t mean Mickey was unaffected by the thought of that much spilt blood on his hands.

“There a problem?” Paolo looks pointedly at Mickey, whose eyes remain downcast as the air between them grows smoky and acrid from the cigarette butts still smoldering in the ashtray.

After taking a second to clear his throat, he snatches the highlighter and gets to work dotting the map with fluorescent points of yellow. Once he’s done, Paolo sweeps the map and the supplies into an open desk drawer without giving any of it so much as a second glance.

“Now, tell me about your handler,” he sniffs, folding his hands neatly in front of him.

“What do you wanna know?”

“Where his children go to school.”

“They’re fucking toddlers, man.”

Paolo shrugs. “Their daycare then.”

Unable to tell if the man simply lives to antagonize or is a natural born psychopath, Mickey keeps his game face on, pretending not to be rattled by the fucked-up line of questioning or the cold menace in his voice.

“I’ll get right on it,” he snorts. “We done?”

“Almost,” Paolo leans forward and raps his knuckles against the desk. “We have it on good authority that Sinaloa plans to move 200 kilos of meth from Colonias Nuevas to Illinois in the next month. Courier’s gonna have a shit-ton of cash on him, too. Get me the exact route for that haul,” he instructs, jutting his chin toward Mickey. “I’ll have my guys stationed at a coupla truck stops along the way.”

Mickey nods in understanding, but there’s a tense set to his jaw. As soon as Paolo mentions Illinois, he gets the niggling feeling that whatever comes next is unlikely to be pleasant.

“On second thought, for a job like this… why not outsource?”

_And, there it is._

“You got family in the Midwest, no?” Paolo enquires, casually crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair. “Can’t think of a better band of trusted thugs for hire than the brothers Milkovich. Call ’em up. See what they say.”

Mickey clicks his tongue. “Not happening.”

“No? Why in the world not?”

“Don’t talk much these days.”

“Do I look like someone interested in your family squabbles? This is business.”

“It’s not… it’s nothing like that, alright? I’m not gonna be your envoy for international fucking relations, man, so just screw off with that shit.”

Paolo affects a look of dismay at the finality of Mickey’s words and blinks as if perplexed by his unwillingness to cooperate.

“I’m a fugitive,” Mickey starts, the sting behind his eyes and the lump in his throat, quickly replaced by unrestrained hostility. “Anyone connected to me in the States is probably under surveillance by the Feds. You obviously know this already, Columbo, so, just quit your bullshit. The fuck else would I be doing on my own in this jalapeño popper of a country?”

Paolo’s not sure why, but getting Mickey to erupt like this makes him downright giddy. It’s almost like watching a stuffed animal shape-shift into a raging grizzly bear, then back into a toy again at the push of a button. They both know that under these circumstances, behaving like a disrespectful shit stain would never be tolerated, so he has to wonder what sort of Machiavellian game Mickey is intent on playing here. Paolo finds the whole thing strangely compelling, certain of nothing except that seeking out and prodding at Mickey’s weaknesses might just be his new favorite thing.

“Well, that’s a shame,” Paolo laments and offers Mickey another cigarette, holding out his lighter this time so he can watch Mickey’s unsteady hands tremble around his own as he sparks up.

“So… not lovin’ the local cuisine then, I take it?” he asks, while lighting up another for himself. “Gotta at least be better than the shit they serve at Cooke County.”

“Get fucked.”

Paolo fights back a chuckle by clearing his throat, stands up and without taking his eyes off Mickey, walks over to a pair of French doors. He cracks one open and gestures to his men who’ve been waiting outside.

Then to his surprise, Mickey, whose got his head lowered and his eyes focused on his shoes, says, “I don’t. Like it, I mean. Most shit’s too spicy for me. And they put avocado on fucking everything.”

“You really gonna insult the staple ingredient of the Yucatan? We take that shit very seriously here.”

“Whatever.” Mickey stubs out his cigarette and rises to his feet once Paolo’s men appear.

Holding his hands aloft, Paolo says something in Spanish that appears to be an order to ease up, because instead of manhandling Mickey as before, the men simply hover by his sides and escort him out of the room.

Paolo flashes a taunting smile at Mickey over his cigarette. “Always a pleasure,” he says and snickers when it earns him an eyeroll in return.

In the next moment, Mickey’s being led through a sunny, open-air courtyard, surrounded by climbing ivy and gurgling water fountains carved into thick stone walls. As they approach an iron gate, behind which the cartel’s SUV awaits, Mickey can’t help but wonder why the hired guns all of sudden feel like bodyguards nor why he’s just been taken on the scenic tour of this heavily armored palace.

___

Mickey’s eyes settle on a postcard taped to the wall above his bed as a flicker of twilight pours in through a small window in his studio apartment. It’s a souvenir that’s followed him from Cooke County Correctional to everyplace in Mexico he’s called home since. He’s not exactly the sentimental type, but this little beach scene he hangs on to. Probably because it helped keep him going while in the joint, so to speak — an idyllic fantasy, already long dispelled, of the life he might’ve had if things had gone differently with Ian.

He sighs, waits for the middle finger emoji to reach its intended recipient before lowering his arm and tossing the cellphone carelessly back onto his nightstand. With his daily check-in with Paolo now complete, he takes a swig from the bottle he’s been clutching, then lights a blunt before checking his other phone to find a cancelation text from the escort service he’d booked earlier. A quiet “fuck” along with a dense curl of smoke seethe out from between his lips.

He opens a web browser and takes a minute to scan local headlines for mentions of any roadside bloodbaths or major heists along the route that he’d mapped out for Paolo over a month ago, but finds nothing. In fact, as far as he can tell, _none_ of the intel he’s fed Paolo has been put to any use, making their entire quid pro quo arrangement feel oddly futile. Still, the possibility that it _might_ only served to fuck with Mickey’s head — and maybe that was the whole point. To torment him by degrees. To plant seeds of dread and guilt over whatever hellfire threatened to rain down on the crew he was betraying. All while the frontlines remained relatively quiet.

Even if Paolo _was,_ for some reason, just biding his time before making a real move against Sinaloa, Mickey knew that the cartel would connect his involvement to it all, soon enough. And, when they did, the retributions would be inhuman. Truth was, Mickey was already a dead man. It’s just that for the time being, Paolo had his lifeless body up on marionette strings, squirming and wriggling for the fucker’s own sadistic enjoyment.

He yawns, gulps some more whiskey straight from the bottle. Rubbing a hand lazily over his boxers, he thinks of ways he might salvage the night now that his plans for getting laid were apparently shot to shit. In a town like San Miguel, Mickey was likelier to find organic vegan cafés than a sleazy red-light district, but if there was one thing he’d come to learn about this country, it’s that a niche underground scene could always be uncovered if you knew where to look.

__

A few hours later, Mickey arrives at the entrance of the Fiesta Charra, stumbling and bracing himself against the doorway. It isn’t the kind of place he’d ordinarily visit, preferring the expediency of back alleys or better still, the convenience of house calls. In a joint like this, he was taking his chances — unarmed, at the mercy of jacked-up bouncers and fall-down drunk as he was. But, fuck it. The path to self-destruction wasn’t paved with sound decision-making and a walking self-inflicted wound like Mickey Milkovich no longer saw a point to exercising any type of caution.

The club is packed, a mostly male crowd that sat huddled around low tables gazing up at strippers who swayed on the center stage. With lights strobing and music blaring, Mickey sees random bodies flash into focus, grinding together in booths along the wall. Before he gets too far inside, a bouncer with an AK-47 strapped to his back and skull tattoos decorating both arms, stops him for a pat-down and the swipe of a metal detector wand.

Ordinarily, Mickey would be barred from entering a club in his current condition, but this is Mexico. A wasted gringo is an easy mark, and he’s welcomed inside without so much as a backward glance. Once on the main floor, a young woman in lingerie approaches, drapes an arm around him and gets suggestively close. “ _Americano_?” she asks and smiles when Mickey nods, then hands him an English bar menu.

Pressing it back against her drunkenly, Mickey shakes his head. “ _Privado_ ,” he hollers over the music, doing his best to stay upright. She grabs on tightly and drags Mickey by his shirt, jostling him a little through a maze of hidden passageways and staircases. Along the way, more armed bouncers lurk in the corners, dissolving in and out of sight under the haze of undulating colored lights. Once they arrive at the club’s private section, the woman trails a manicured fingernail down his chest. Mickey’s tastes are specific, but pickings were slim in a country bereft of natural redheads. Normally, he’d make an exception for this one, but tonight, it’s the memory of pale skin and freckles that’s making his dick twitch.

Mickey presses their foreheads together, leans his arms against her shoulders for support. “ _Pelirojo_ ,” he tells her with urgency in his voice. It’s what he wants right now. An insatiable craving. Red hair, freckles. A boy. She rubs her thumb and middle finger together, a demand to see the money up front. Upon flashing her a wad of cash, she whispers in English, “of course, _papi._ Of course.” Mickey’s promptly hustled into a small room with a rusted metal futon and peeling paint on the walls and in the corner, a bar cart that he wastes no time raiding. Normally, when Mickey imbibes, he makes sure the bottles are unopened. He never lets anyone handle his booze or leaves his drinks unattended, even when he’s gotta hit a bathroom. It’s no secret what can happen in places like this if you’re not careful. But tonight, too uncoordinated to pour, she takes over the decanting duties and shoves him backward onto the futon.

Although by all outward appearances, Fiesta Charra was a gentlemen’s club, it fronted a flesh trade of a different sort for clients seeking discretion or the servicing of special kinks. The woman hands Mickey a full glass, straddles him, sliding down slowly until nearly seated in his lap and purrs, “ _espera_ …” an instruction to wait for her here. When she leaves a short while later, Mickey rests his glass on a side table and gropes around clumsily for his phone.

In his stupor, he fires off a text message and stares blankly at the screen, unsure of the response he expects, then tosses the phone aside when she reappears. Beside her are a couple of rent-boys, both hot as fuck but not a strand of red hair between them. Mickey lets out an exasperated sigh, takes a big gulp of whiskey and feels his eyelids grow heavy. Suddenly, hands and mouths are everywhere. Between Mickey’s thighs, sprawled across his chest, pulling roughly at his hair. There’s a heady mix of sweat, heavily lotioned skin, cigarette smoke and chemicals in the air that overtakes his senses. It mingles with the sound of his belt unbuckling, his own harsh breathing and the music that pounds in discordant rhythms as fingers wind around his cock and press against his throat and everything fades to black.

Mickey wills his eyes to open. His head is too heavy to hold upright, so he lets it loll against the back of a leather couch. He’s in a different room now, an office. There’s a commotion, the sound of rapid-fire bickering between several men holding guns. He sees a skeleton belt buckle with diamonds for eyes, someone spitting on the floor by his feet. An overwhelming urge to escape kicks in and Mickey tries sitting up but it’s like his limbs are being held down by weights. He struggles against the crushing fatigue, but still his eyelids flutter to a close, exhausted by the effort.

Middle-of-the-night fireworks and barking roof dogs jolt Mickey awake as a rush of fresh air cools his hot skin and the brace of a strong arm keeps him on his feet. “Yo, back the fuck up, _cabrón,_ ” Mickey slurs and pushes in protest as he’s flung into the front seat of a convertible. He claws at the door’s handle, but the sluggishness of his movements only causes his head to slump against the passenger-side window, all the fight in him gone.

When the door opens to his tiny apartment, it’s almost morning. Practically moved to tears by the sight of his bed, like refuge after a bad storm, Mickey kicks off his shoes, makes quick work of yanking off his shirt and collapses onto the mattress. It takes a second for the cigarette smoke to reach his nostrils before Mickey realizes he’s not alone and he squints into the darkness to find a pair of piercing blue eyes glaring back at him.

“The fuck you doin’ here?”

The soft glow of a cigarette illuminates Paolo’s face as he leans back easily against Mickey’s dresser.

“You texted me.”

“No, I fucking didn’t.”

“About to get my kidneys harvested,” he reads aloud from his phone screen, then turns the device toward Mickey and waggles it from side to side. “Wish you were here.”

Mickey grumbles, mortified to realize that he’d not only tried and failed to drunk-dial Gallagher, but like an absolute moron, did it from the wrong fucking cellphone.

“My mistake,” he mumbles, burying his face deeper into the pillows. “You can go now.”

But Paolo doesn’t go. Instead, he flicks on a light and wanders into the kitchen. Mickey can hear him rummage through his meagerly stocked fridge, inspecting random jars and grousing in disapproval at their labels, before finally settling on a beer that he pries open against the counter.

“Ever seen a severed head before, Mick?” 

Mickey sighs. “Can’t say as I have.”

“No? Cause I almost got to tonight,” Paolo shrugs casually and brings the beer to his lips. “Toured the kill room. Saw the chain saw. Then… nothing,” he clicks his tongue, “so anticlimactic.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Mickey garbles in a voice that’s decidedly unapologetic.

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. So, a mid-level Sinaloa pissant walks into a titty bar run by his rivals…”

“Heard it,” Mickey interrupts, fists tightening around his comforter in a white-knuckled grip. 

“Fun fact,” Paolo presses on, after taking another sip of beer. “When cartels want a body disappeared, they’ll often feed the human remains to pigs. It’s why the meat used to make carnitas is so tender.”

At that, Mickey’s head snaps up and he shoots a look of revulsion at Paolo. “That can’t be true.”

“Can’t it though?” he squints against the smoke of his cigarette and takes a long pull. “Now,” he sniffs, “a few words about Rohypnol, a tranquilizer ten times more powerful than Valium.” 

Mickey reluctantly gets up despite the room spinning around him and shuffles into the kitchen. He uncaps a bottle of spring water and drinks, coming up for air only after he’s drained most of it, then burps loudly.

“I have a question. How the fuck long is this TED talk gonna be exactly?”

“Wrapping up shortly. Have patience.”

Paolo sets down his beer and pulls a wad of crumpled cash from his jacket, which he plops onto the counter, followed by a phone, a set of housekeys, a lighter and a baggie of coke. All of it is Mickey’s and a fresh wave of embarrassment washes over him, not so much at realizing he’d gotten fleeced at the club — that was to be expected — but that this smug asshole now had even more damning shit to lord over his head.

Paolo tugs on the sleeves of his jacket and closes the distance between them, pressing his face inches from Mickey’s.

“The guys who run the Fiesta Charra — these _swaggering_ _dons_ I had the pleasure of dealing with tonight… I told ’em the gringo with the knuckle tattoos is off limits. You wanna know what they said? ‘What knuckles?’ and stuck your hand in a meat grinder.”

Mickey looks down and sure enough, finds the nails scraped and the tips freshly skinned off the fingers of his right hand. He swallows thickly, as Paolo’s eyes darken and his voice all of a sudden grows foreboding and cold.

“Wasn’t kidding about that fucking kill room, Mick. And negotiating a hostage situation? Not exactly how I’d planned on spending my Saturday night.”

Paolo takes a slow drag of his cigarette and looms over Mickey with such intensity that the latter staggers back a few steps.

“What if I hadn’t shown when I did, hmm? What then? You really thought _you,_ a known Sinaloa flunky, woulda gotten to walk outta one of _our_ clubs in one piece?”

Their eyes meet for the briefest flicker before Paolo’s gaze wanders down to a weird scribble inked across Mickey’s chest. He frowns, tips his head slightly. There’s a man’s name — a fucking _misspelled_ man’s name, tattooed on Milkovich’s chest?

For his part, Mickey clenches his jaw but doesn’t answer and instead, absentmindedly flexes the fingers of his battered hand. After a brief stretch of silence, he watches Paolo drop his cigarette into his unfinished beer, push away from the counter and make his way toward the door.

“Anyway…” he says quietly before clearing his throat, “classier ways to get your dick wet, Milkovich. I’ll see you.”

Mickey rolls his eyes and crashes back into bed once Paolo lets himself out. He plunges into a fitful sleep with dreams of the beach that doesn’t let up ’til late the next morning.


	3. Chapter 3

Their daily check-ins continue by phone, but it would be another three weeks before a familiar SUV pulls up alongside Mickey while he’s out running errands. He lowers his head and keeps walking, pretending there isn’t an armored black car rolling slowly beside him down the street. When the tinted window lowers to reveal one of Paolo’s goons behind the wheel, Mickey grimaces but reluctantly gets in. Nearly an hour later, the car’s pulling off into an isolated field somewhere in the desert highlands.

Mickey hops out of the backseat and onto a rocky footpath, where a few feet away, Paolo waits, leaning against the hood of a convertible.

“No blindfold today?”

Paolo shoots him an impassive look. “Maybe this is your final resting place, Mick…” he responds casually, then nods to the SUV’s driver, signaling for him to take off. “Wouldn’t make sense keeping its location a secret from you, now would it?”

“Your ‘muscle’ just hit the road,” Mickey points out before sweeping a hand in the direction of the retreating SUV. “You don’t exactly strike me as the type to get your own hands dirty, plus… the ground up here is way too hard to shovel,” he adds, kicking his sneaker into the rocky earth to illustrate the point.

“You assume I’d bother with a burial,” Paolo shrugs and begins walking further down the trail, shooting glances back at Mickey to make sure he falls in step behind him. After climbing up a steep ridge, they approach a low stone wall, which Mickey scales first, easily vaulting over it before Paolo drops down beside him with a soft thud.

When he’s able to straighten up and gaze around, Mickey’s surprised to discover what looks like an abandoned ghost town spread out in front of them, staggered over miles of hilltop and scrubby terrain.

“What is this place?”

“Old mining village,” Paolo informs him, jumping down from their summit to hike the short distance to the ruins below. “Used to be a boomtown ’til about the 1890s. Now look at it.”

Mickey peers out over the roofless buildings with their crumbling facades and the patches of overgrown brush and nopal that grew wildly in random clusters.

“Reminds me of the South Side,” he says and approaches with measured steps, careful to dodge the broken glass and crushed beer cans that littered the grounds. 

Paolo sits on a stone ledge after lighting a cigarette and gestures for Mickey to do the same.

“What do you know about Salamanca?”

“The oil refinery?” Mickey shrugs. “What about it?”

Paolo puffs on his cigarette and gazes out at the horizon. “We’ve got a guy at the plant. A pump operator who says there’s a huge diesel delivery comin’ through in the next coupla weeks. If we can manage it, we wanna syphon about 60,000 liters of it into tankers stationed at our ranch a few miles away. Everything’s ready. The workers. The equipment. Only thing we _can’t_ seem to get our hands on is…”

“…the _huachicolero?_ ” Mickey offers, surprising Paolo with his knowledge on the subject.

“Yeah, exactly.”

Mickey’s not involved with this particular racket himself, but knows how highly specialized it is. It made kingpins out of ordinary technicians — guys who’d figured out how to skim gas from refineries and funnel it into the reserves of the highest bidders. The problem was that _huachicoleros,_ these fuel thieves as they were known, were fucking ghosts. It was almost impossible to secure one’s services, especially in oil-rich central Mexico where the demand for them had skyrocketed in recent years.

He darts a sidelong glance Paolo’s way. “What makes you think I can help?”

“The Sinaloa Cartel doesn’t contract out. They have their own guy and I’m thinking with a little coercion, maybe we can turn him.”

The brunette furrows his brow, but says nothing for a while until he finally shakes his head and issues a heavy sigh which of course, piques Paolo’s interest.

“Enlighten me, Milkovich,” he says around the cigarette dangling from his lips. “What am I not seeing here?”

Not surprisingly, Mickey hesitates. Ratting out his crew, divulging secrets — none of it is in his nature, but Paolo shoots him a withering look, reminding him that it’s what he’s here for and he reluctantly begins.

“Our guy? You can ‘try’ to turn him, sure,” Mickey says, running a hand over his lower lip, “but what he’ll do is jack up the price on you last minute, syphon your shit into his own tankers, then charge you three pesos to buy back every liter of fuel he steals. Diverting the mainlines is an artform, but syphoning a tap that’s already in place?” Mickey raises his eyebrows pointedly. “Your tech at Salamanca can do that shit. All he’d have to do is connect an underground hose from an existing tap straight into drums that you can keep buried at your ranch. That way, you have reserves to bleed from continuously. For years even, undetected.”

It takes Paolo a second to process what Mickey’s saying, and the more he works the idea over in his head, the more it intrigues.

“So, what you’re suggesting is that we milk fuel directly from Sinaloa’s pipeline tap instead of from the refinery.”

“Figuring out where the tap’s buried is the trickiest part,” Mickey admits with a shrug, “but our _huachicolero_ pays civilian lookouts to surveil his taps every coupla weeks. Just have one of them tailed and they’ll lead you right to it.”

Paolo flicks ash off his cigarette before sliding it between his lips again and watches as the other man stands up to stretch and flex his shoulders. His fascination with Mickey had been rooted mainly in morbid curiosity, like watching a speeding train derail from its tracks in slow motion. But here and now, Paolo is decidedly impressed, seeing with new eyes what amounted to another, very different side of him. The hotheaded gringo hellbent on self-destruction he already knew and now here’s this other, full-of-surprises version, a lot more cunning and sharp than most people likely gave him credit for.

“So what kind of mine was this?” Mickey asks.

“Gold mine,” Paolo responds, the implication of his words not exactly lost on him in the moment, “still haunted by the miners that died here when the shafts flooded.”

“The shafts are still open?”

“Yeah, man,” he says, crushing his spent cigarette against the weathered cobblestones at his feet. “Five-hundred-foot drops all over the town. Unguarded, no railings, no warning signs, even.”

Paolo stands up and grabs an empty beer bottle by its neck, winds up and throws it over the ledge. It lands, smashing loudly against the remains of an old smelting tower below. 

“Ah, now see, had that gone into one of the shafts, you wouldn’t’ve heard the sound of glass breaking.”

Mickey grunts in acknowledgement and reaches for another discarded bottle on the ground. The men look out into the distance, watching as he sends it hurling further over the smelting tower and out of sight, then wait for the telltale sound of shattering glass but there’s nothing. Just silence.

“Not bad,” Paolo says, tipping his head in Mickey’s direction. “Play a lot of little league growing up?”

“Some,” Mickey answers coolly, memories like that one still too raw to broach without a sting.

They continue free-throwing until they run out of bottles, then begin the journey back down the ridge and toward Paolo’s car.

Just as they approach his convertible, the cartel’s SUV pulls up alongside them and the driver cuts the engine before stepping out holding a plastic bag.

“Perfect timing,” Paolo gestures for the man to hand it off to Mickey, who casts a look of apprehension over the exchange.

“The fuck’s this?”

“Chicago-style hotdogs.”

“What?” Mickey grimaces, peering into the bag cautiously.

“No avocados. No habaneros.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not kidding.”

Mickey blinks at Paolo, confused and not the least bit convinced.

“There’s a town nearby. San Luis De La Paz. Only place I know that makes ’em. Figured we were close by, so…”

“So, you sent your ‘muscle’ to buy us hotdogs?” Mickey looks at him incredulously, nodding his head slowly as he speaks.

“Just you, man. I don’t eat that shit,” Paolo taunts and hops into his car, leaving a bemused Mickey standing on the gravelly path holding a bag of takeout.

“Hey, Mick,” Paolo pulls up beside him and calls out from the behind the wheel, “know what they call miners who get trapped in cave-ins?”

Mickey shakes his head.

“Squealers,” he says through a smirk, then outright laughs when Mickey flips him off.

Mickey climbs into the SUV’s backseat after Paolo drives away and darts skeptical glances at his food the whole way home.

__

Mickey’s exhausted. He’s been driving for hours, fresh off a run that began in one of Sinaloa’s northern territories to what’s now the final leg of his journey back into central Mexico. He has to check in periodically with his crew because on a run like this he’d be passing through several hostile zones, where anything could happen: an attack by a rival cartel, a bust at a military roadblock. When he’s about an hour away from the final drop-off point, one of his phones begins buzzing in its cradle on the dashboard. It’s Paolo requesting a meeting. _Not a good time_ , he types back, darting his eyes cautiously between the road and the phone screen. Considering that Mickey’s hauling a small campervan full of disassembled AR-15s, he isn’t exactly keen on making any unscheduled pitstops.

Paolo responds with a pin of his location and Mickey sighs, realizing that he’s only two exits up the road from him in an area called La Cieneguita. _Jesus Christ._ Having to bend to Paolo’s whims like this is fucking ridiculous, but he figures getting this shit over with now’s gotta be better than another random ambush by his thugs out on the street.

Before long, Mickey’s taking the highway offramp to a quiet one-lane road that stretches over miles of desert, until finally arriving at the gatehouse of a large, rambling estate. The cartel’s SUV is parked beside it and Mickey tenses when he receives grim nods from the henchmen in the front seat. The iron gates swing open on his approach and Paolo’s voice crackles through the intercom.

“Let’s go, Milkovich. To the end of the driveway.”

He sighs and runs a hand over his face. After making his way down the long gravel path, Mickey pulls up to an old manor house that’s dark and eerily quiet in the fading sunlight. He patiently watches the front door for any signs of movement, when Paolo’s face suddenly appears out of nowhere in the passenger-side window.

"Camping, huh?"

“Jesus!” Mickey shuts his eyes and exhales a shuddering breath, before stepping out of the van. “Yeah, not exactly,” he grumbles and opens the sliding door a little to give Paolo a glimpse at the cargo inside. There’s a bunch of camping equipment stacked in neat piles, but as Mickey demonstrates, it’s all been rigged to conceal assorted gun parts and ammo.

“Figured I could pass as a crunchy American on a one-man spirit quest if I got pulled over,” he says, giving his flannel shirt a tug and Paolo arches an eyebrow at him, impressed by the ingenuity.

“When’re you expected at your drop site?”

“I dunno. An hour, maybe. Give or take.”

“Plenty of time,” Paolo hustles past him to the back of the house and motions for Mickey to follow.

When they turn the corner, Mickey stops in his tracks, awestruck by a labyrinth of outdoor pools spread out in front of them. The grounds are surrounded by tall brick colonnades united by cobblestone footpaths and iron benches amid terracotta planters blooming with succulents and agave. The warmth of the water turns the air misty and it’s all really beautiful, but also completely deserted and Mickey blinks at the surreal emptiness of it all.

“Thermal springs,” Paolo says in response to the puzzled look on Mickey’s face. “Right now, it operates as a day spa, but I’m thinking of buying it. Developing it into a resort. A boutique hotel, a couple of restaurants…” he waves a hand to indicate the empty plots of land where the structures could potentially be built. “Come have a look.”

The main house is locked down for the evening, but Paolo guides him through some partially excavated build sites, the water capture and redistribution systems, the solar panels and the well pumps, explaining the particulars of each along the way. He flicks the property’s lights on during the tour, then shuts them off before arriving at the next feature and Mickey listens attentively, though is unclear as to why he should give a shit about any of it.

“So, whaddya think?” Paolo asks when they return to their starting point overlooking the water. He reaches into his jacket for a joint and sparks up while Mickey thinks about how to answer the question.

“It’s nice, I guess?” he snorts and looks around again at the landscape. “Like as a year-round destination. I mean, considering the closest beach is six hours away or whatever.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Paolo sits down on a bench and kicks back to watch the sunset.

The joint passes easily between them for a while, until he nonchalantly asks, “so, who’d you try to kill back in the States?” causing Mickey to choke on the smoke in his lungs and dissolve into a coughing fit. 

“Excuse me?” he rasps, his throat burning from the effort of inhaling.

“You’re an escaped con, right? It’s what brought you here, so… what was the reason?”

“Jesus Christ, seriously?”

“Seriously,” Paolo repeats.

Coming clean about what landed him in jail would require talking about Ian, which he has zero intention of doing, not with Paolo and certainly not while fucking stoned. Mickey clears his throat.

“I went after someone who tried to hurt a person I cared about,” he says, keeping the whole sordid tale as vague as possible.

“How?”

“How what?”

“How’d you do it?”

“The fuck’s it matter?”

“I wanna know.”

“Roofies,” Mickey finally confesses after losing a staring match with Paolo, to which the other man simply laughs and takes another hit.

“You miss it, much? Chicago, I mean.”

“Sometimes. Maybe,” Mickey spits to chase away the harsh burn of smoke lingering in his mouth, then reaches for the joint again.

“Why not Canada? At least there you could speak the language.”

“And what, join the Dixon City Bloods?” he snickers. “Considered it but, I dunno, man. Chose the sun. What about you?”

“What about me?”

It could just be the effects of the weed settling over him, but Mickey suddenly feels emboldened to ask a few questions of his own. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t at least somewhat curious about Paolo, mercurial prick that he was, and now seemed as good a time as any to press for answers.

“Don’t you have better places to be?”

Paolo pulls back and squints at Mickey as if trying to work out what he could possibly be going on about. 

“C’mon man. You could be anywhere right now. You could be jumping off a fucking megayacht somewhere in the Mediterranean. I mean if it was _me_ , if _my_ family owned hotels all over the world and _I_ was practically a fucking Instagram model? Shit. Who’d wanna be here, neck-deep in this bullshit, if they didn’t have to?” 

As soon as Mickey gets the words out, he regrets them for all the smugness on Paolo’s face at the mere suggestion that Mickey’s researched him this extensively.

“All true, Milkovich,” he says through a sigh, stretching out his legs and leaning his arms easily against the seatback. “Don’t usually stay any one place too long. Especially when the turf-warring and shit around here really starts to get dirty. I’ve got ‘muscle’ around me, as you like to say,” he smirks and takes a few quick pulls off the joint. “I take precautions. At least I try to. Same can’t be said of some others I might know,” he adds, shooting a deliberate glance Mickey’s way.

“Yeah, well. I’m not the one claimin’ to keep a low profile while driving a convertible Bugatti.”

“Nah, of course not. Just a van full of semi-automatic rifles.”

“Speaking of…” Mickey tips his head in the direction of the vehicle still parked in the driveway and begins making his way toward the front of the house.

Paolo snuffs out the joint and follows, trailing a few steps behind until he catches up to Mickey just as he’s reaching for the handle of the driver’s side door.

“Hey, Mick,” he says, cocking his head and looking at him intently through hooded eyelids. “Who’s Ian Gallagher?”

Mickey unthinkingly places a hand on his tattooed chest but doesn’t answer because in the next instant, his head turns at the sound of an approaching car. Only, it’s not coming from the driveway where Paolo’s men are stationed. It’s advancing from another direction, an unpaved service road obscured by some hilly terrain on the property’s edge.

“Oh shit,” Mickey breathes, realizing exactly who the car belongs to. An obnoxious yellow roadster he knows well and could spot from a mile away. “They’re here for me. For the guns, I mean. I—I haven’t checked in for a while. Oh shit.”

The men fall silent as the reality of the situation hits them. Mickey freezes, unable to move or even breathe, caught quite literally in the headlights of the oncoming vehicle.

“Look at me, Mick,” Paolo unholsters a revolver from inside his jacket, grips it by the barrel and hands it to Mickey. “I’m wearing Kevlar.”

Mickey can’t seem to get his brain to stop buzzing as he stands there, completely numb, barely able to close his fist around the gun handle.

“Mick!” Paolo says again and grabs him hard by the scruff of his neck. “Fucking look at me! I’m wearing Kevlar.”

__

Paolo’s voice is jarring enough to pull Mickey out of his stupor and before he can think too hard about his next move, he’s grabbing him roughly by the collar, kicking his legs out from under him and shoving him, face-first to the ground.

Paolo grunts when he lands and Mickey kicks dirt in his face, then stands threateningly over him with the gun cocked and aimed at his head. A second later, the car’s headlights illuminate the scene and Mickey digs into his pocket with his free hand to retrieve his car keys.

“Perfect timing,” he hollers once two guys on his crew step out of the car with the engine still running to survey the situation.

The guys are young Sinaloa recruits who understand some English, and to Mickey’s relief, also a pair of bumbling amateurs likely to believe a bullshit cover story without asking too many questions. He tosses the keys to one of them, a kid no more than 17 years old with prison ink on both arms and a bandana around his forehead. 

“ _Oye, muchacho_ , I need you to take the camper and make the drop for me _,_ ” he instructs, before turning his attention to the other gang member. “And you... after I get done workin’ over this _pendejo_ right here, you can help me bury what’s left of him.”

A tense silence settles over the newcomers who seem completely confused, until one of them juts his chin out questioningly at the man splayed out on the ground in front of Mickey.

“U.S. marshal,” Mickey tells him coolly, the gun still drawn and leveled at Paolo’s head. “Been tailing me for days, apparently, but I got the jump on his ass a few exits back and brought ’em out here so we can have a little chat. Isn’t that right, pig motherfucker?”

The guys look down at Paolo and although he’s got his hands over his head, Mickey moves to stand in front of him, concealing him from view in case they somehow manage to see or recognize his face.

“ _Federale_?” asks the younger man.

“ _Sí_ , yes. U.S. _Federale._ Whatever the fuck.” Mickey snorts. “Says there’s a whole interagency task force workin’ to extradite my ass to the States. Please. Such bullshit,” he laughs mirthlessly and shakes his head.

“Says the place is surrounded and it’ll be crawling with _policía_ any minute, but I think he’s just tryin’ to save his own skin. What do you think, _muchachos_?”

Paolo groans when Mickey kicks him in the ribcage, sending a stabbing jolt of pain through the left side of his body.

One of the cartel members charges forward, eager to join the onslaught, when Mickey suddenly and completely without warning, takes aim at Paolo’s back and fires at point-blank range.

Paolo lurches from the impact of the bullet just as the earsplitting sound of the gunshot startles the guy into backing off a bit.

It also prompts another set of headlights to suddenly flick on and the loud roar of a car engine to advance on the men left standing.

“Well shit. Look who sent for the fucking cavalry, after all,” Mickey says flatly while scratching at his temple with the gun’s barrel.

He shoves the revolver into the back of his waistband while the cartel members, spurred on by the impending chaos of the moment, scramble to get away.

One hops into the campervan with the cache of guns inside and takes off at lightning speed down the service road, while the other races for the two-seater and curses up a storm when Mickey makes a show of reaching for the passenger door, eager to flee the scene with him.

 _“Vayate_ _, maricon,”_ he barks and glares coldly at Mickey before peeling out, leaving the smell of burning tires in his wake.

Mickey’s heart thunders in his chest as he watches both men retreat, then looks down at Paolo, silently praying that his fucking body armor worked as intended. He swallows hard before raising his hands in surrender as a familiar black SUV continues barreling toward him from the main driveway.

__

Before they can draw their weapons on Mickey, Paolo gets up from the ground and waves his men off. With their help, he hobbles over to the SUV, his breathing noticeably labored and coming out in ragged gasps. 

“We should lay low here for a bit in case those dumbasses get wise and decide to wait in ambush,” he says to Mickey while grimacing in pain, then repeats the instructions for his men in Spanish.

Paolo gingerly climbs into the backseat as Mickey crouches beside the open door, willing his heartbeat to slow down a bit.

Mickey shakes his head. “Doubt it. Those two aren’t exactly the sharpest knives, but yeah. Waiting’s not the worst idea.”

After wiping the dirt out of his eyes and running filthy hands along the length of his jeans, Paolo reaches into his pocket for a pack of smokes.

“So, listen,” he says and sparks one up, then continues to play with his lighter, letting the flame flare up and wink out over and over again as he snaps the metal lid open and shut with his thumb. “I think you should move into my guesthouse.”

Mickey straightens up and bums a cigarette from Paolo. He takes a steadying drag and presses the heels of both hands into his eyes. “Shit, man. That was… that was fuckin’ insane is what that was.”

“You hear what I just said?” Paolo rests a hand on his aching ribs and inhales sharply through his teeth.

“Yeah, your guesthouse. Hilarious.”

“I’m not messing around, man. You’ve been lucky so far, but that shit’s bound to run out on you. And when those two fucktards start spreading word about whatever twisted shit they _think_ went down here tonight, your crew’s gonna come after you, Mick. I guarantee it.”

Mickey stares at Paolo disbelievingly before huffing a quiet laugh around his cigarette.

“So, you wanna get in the Sinaloa crosshairs _with_ me? You wanna be under the same _roof_ as me when that shit goes down.”

Mickey takes a drag and Paolo watches as a plume of smoke escapes from between his lips and mingles with the curls drifting up from his fingers.

“For starters, I live behind stone walls, three feet thick with round-the-clock security, including sharpshooters stationed around the property. And, as you already pointed out, if I’m feelin’ the heat, I can leave any time I want. Go anywhere in the world I want. _You_ can’t,” he straightens up and hisses as another stab of pain explodes between his shoulder blades.

“The way you’re going, Mick, you’re gonna get fucking caught and you’re gonna get fucking killed. It’s just a matter of time,” he sniffs. “You’re moving in.”

Mickey takes a deep drag off his cigarette, leans into the car and fixes Paolo with an icy, unblinking stare.

“Now, you listen to me. I know you’re operating under some fucked-up presumption that I signed on to be your family pet or your house elf or whatever the fuck master-slave relationship you _think_ we have going on here. But I am not, and I repeat this as firmly as I fucking can for you, am not, under any circumstances, moving the fuck into your guesthouse.”


	4. Chapter 4

Mickey moves the fuck into Paolo’s guesthouse. It’s not like he’s given too much choice in the matter, considering he simply comes home one day to find most of his shit gone and a few remaining incidentals packed up in boxes.

 _What the actual fuck is this?_ Mickey types into his phone, punching the letters so hard he nearly cracks the screen. He attaches a picture of his stripped-bare apartment and waits for a response.

What arrives a few seconds later is, _tell you all about it when you get home,_ followed by what Mickey can only presume is a picture of the welcome mat outside Paolo’s guesthouse.

“Fuck!” Mickey hurls the phone into one of the open cardboard boxes where it lands with a thud atop a pile of clothing. He can see through the window that Paolo’s henchmen are parked across the street, waiting for him to get his remaining shit together and go.

Muttering obscenities under his breath, Mickey heads to his closet where he removes a metal grate from the wall, reaches into the vent and retrieves a lockbox hidden there. He takes a quick inventory of the contents inside: a stack of cash, a couple of fake IDs, his 9 mm along with ammo, a brick of marijuana and a shattered crystal paperweight sealed within a Ziploc bag. After placing it all into a backpack, he hoists it onto his shoulders and gathers the remaining boxes in his arms, before angrily stalking off toward the SUV. 

____

Several things strike Mickey when he arrives at Paolo’s mansion. Chief among them is that he’s permitted to walk around without restriction, like a once-captive peacock suddenly given free rein to strut the grounds at the county zoo. The second is just how much Paolo runs the place like a luxury hotel, which given his background in hospitality management shouldn’t be all that surprising. But, this shit went _far_ beyond mints on a pillow.

Not only has all of Mickey’s shit been unpacked and neatly put away for him, but there are bottles of Evian on his nightstand and a new pair of slippers by his neatly made bed and a mountain of fluffy towels along with a fresh robe in his bathroom, all of which smell like lemons and lavender. His refrigerator is filled with American snacks and sodas and the cabinets are stocked with every kind of pantry item, but all of that hardly matters because an engraved menu card with the evening’s dinner selections is propped up on his kitchen counter, plus a member of the waitstaff is apparently setting up for afternoon tea outside in the courtyard.

Scowling at the stomach-churning bougieness of it all, Mickey marches over to confront the object of his ire, who’s resting on a chaise by the pool with an open laptop on his knees.

Mickey wants no part of this living-in-a-gilded-cage bullshit, and tells him as much after shutting the device and unceremoniously tossing it aside. To this, Paolo yawns, stretches a toned arm above his head and readjusts his sunglasses.

“I want out, man. I’ll take my chances back at my own place. I’m not fucking staying here another minute.”

“Your apartment’s gone already,” Paolo says, inhaling for a moment longer than necessary to convey his boredom over the subject. “It was a short-term rental and you were paying by the week. Properties in town, even shitholes like yours, move like hotcakes in this housing market.”

“Excuse me?” Mickey thunders at Paolo, who simply clicks his tongue and gazes at him impassively.

“When your Sinaloa cronies come knocking, which they no doubt will, they’ll find you gone and that’ll make _perfect_ sense when they check with the Guanajuato police, who thanks to _me_ , have an arrest report on file for an undocumented detainee that fits your description. Then, in about a months’ time, a paper trail and a _whole lotta_ strong evidence, including multiple witness accounts and security camera footage, will suggest that _said_ detainee got released on a technicality and fled to Mexico City. At which point, you can _actually_ hop a bus to far-the-fuck-away-from-here and start a new life for yourself.”

Mickey’s eyes narrow as he watches Paolo get up from the lounge chair and collect his laptop.

“Think you can manage to lay low until then without having a fucking aneurism?” he adds offhandedly before scooping up a finger sandwich and casually strolling back into the main house.

____

Up until moving in, Mickey’s only experience with the house had been through a blurred, nightmarish sense of reality, so it makes sense that living there would prove just as bizarre and surreal. By day, the place is a hub for business, both legal and otherwise, between bloated men in expensive suits having rowdy sit-downs over cognac and cigars. At night, it transforms into a hedonistic pleasuredome for Paolo’s beautiful friends, who are nothing if not poster children for depravity and excess. Even more fucking nuts is that all this plays out amid a steady stream of armed guards and snipers and patrolmen with bomb-sniffing dogs who put visitors through exhaustive checks before permitting anyone through the gates. 

Mickey assimilates to this curious new lifestyle the only way he knows how — which is to say, not at all and holes up in the guesthouse most days with the curtains shut. He can leave whenever he wants, but finds there’s little need to, considering that between all the maids and round-the-clock waitstaff, his every possible need is met in the most servile ways. There’s a basketball court, a game room with a pool table, a home theater and a gym, but Mickey doesn’t know where exactly he falls in the “upstairs-downstairs” dynamic of the place and so, he avoids it all in favor of getting stoned and playing video games alone in his bedroom.

There’s really nothing to complain about and Mickey knows it. He knows he should be grateful, but he remains salty as fuck whenever Paolo’s around. Not only is the man letting him live in a palace, he’s also giving Mickey the chance to sever ties with both cartels and figure out a new path for himself, free from any illicit bullshit. And that’s precisely what fucks with Mickey’s head the most, because thoughts of a real future invariably led back to the impossibility of a life with Ian. One night, he finds himself lying in bed gazing at his ratty old postcard of the beach and ponders where he might land next after leaving San Miguel. But even picturing someplace along the coast or a small resort town near the border feels like picking at a never-healing wound he’s once again being forced to reopen and let bleed.

Mickey sighs when some louder-than-usual carousing at the pool disrupts his reverie, and for a moment, he considers whether or not to investigate. Before he can think better of it, he’s climbing out of bed with a groan and stepping onto his balcony which overlooks the courtyard. 

Normally, these orgiastic bacchanals of Paolo’s would be winding down by now with some night swimming, but the group is dressed to the nines, all bandage-dresses and black leather. From the looks of it, they’re pregaming before heading out and a pretty blond, the first to notice Mickey standing there, calls out to him and invites him to join.

Mickey sucks his teeth as five sets of eyes immediately flick up and gaze at him. Resting his hands on the balcony railing and leaning forward, he asks, “where ya goin’?” just to be civil even though he’s got very little interest in the answer.

“House party in the desert,” she replies, which unsurprisingly does nothing to sway him.

Mickey shakes his head, “not my scene, thanks,” and steps back, eager to return to his room when a chorus of cajoling voices emanates from everyone in the group. Everyone except for Paolo, who’s got a small, amused smile playing on his lips as he regards Mickey from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Maybe it’s the days on end spent cooped up and housebound or the smug look on Paolo’s face, but regardless of the reason, Mickey’s suddenly struck by an intense desire to loosen the leash from his fucking throat a bit. Nothing about him, from his knuckle tats to his boorish personality, belongs among this crowd of international highfliers, which makes the prospect of embarrassing Paolo in front of them an added bonus.

“On second thought, fuck it,” Mickey says, making a crude jerking-off gesture with his fist. “Could do with a change of scenery.” 

___

Over the next few hours, Mickey keeps to myself while throwing back tequila shots and cramming edibles into his mouth by the fistful. The only one of Paolo’s friends not completely revolted by his standoffish behavior appears to be the blonde, who sits down beside him on a daybed, overlooking an infinity pool.

“So, where’d Paolo find you, anyway?” she asks and Mickey clicks his tongue, then drains an entire beer in four long gulps.

“Don’t matter,” he belches, “we’ll be losin’ each other soon enough.”

She smiles, apparently undaunted by the shit manners either, and cozies up to him, casually draping a leg over Mickey’s and letting her stiletto pump come to rest atop his booted feet.

Mickey taps a cigarette out of its pack, lights up and offers one to blondie, then snickers, realizing he’s already forgotten her name. Or maybe she never told it to him in the first place — either way, he doesn’t care enough to correct the mistake.

“Alright,” he mumbles around the cigarette dangling from his lips, “so, where’d the fuck Paolo find you then?”

She tells him that they’d met years ago at boarding school and have stayed close friends ever since. She’s the daughter of a Russian oligarch or a Middle Eastern oil baron or some such horseshit and can namedrop pretty much every guest at the party. She points out various faces in the crowd including local hipsters and artists, celebrity influencers and stars of Latin American trash TV. Predictably, Mickey remains unimpressed and goes about getting sloshed while she continues droning in his ear.

After a while, the music picks up and the party’s energy shifts into some more pulsating and chaotic. A whole new wave of after-hours guests come pouring in and more of the swarm spills out onto the terrace where they’re sitting together.

“Gettin’ kinda loud,” the blonde hollers over the blaring music and snuggles closer to Mickey, stopping just short of pressing into his chest. “Wanna find someplace quieter to talk or—”

Mickey snorts and flashes her a lazy, half-cocked smile.

“I promise to behave,” she assures him and holds up a placating hand before adding, “Paolo already told me you’re off limits.”

Mickey detaches himself from the girl and stands up, maybe a little too quickly, and leans a steadying hand against the low wall behind him to keep himself upright.

“You okay?”

“Never better,” he grouses and inhales sharply through his nose, not really wanting to think about the implications of that statement.

Could be a number of reasons why Paolo warned her off, but the arrogant prick could go fuck himself regardless. He doesn’t own Mickey, nor would he ever, and the idea that he could keep dictating the terms like this, however rational or reasonable, still makes Mickey wanna put his head through a wall. He then briefly weighs which scenario might piss Paolo off more, if he pukes in the swimming pool right now or tucks away into the shadows with blondie, letting her live out her slumdog fantasies with a ride on his cock.

But none of that really matters, Mickey realizes, because Ian Gallagher is currently dancing just a few feet away from him under the glow of strobing, blue-filtered lights. As his eyes trail over the face that’s haunted his dreams since that day at the border crossing, a light-headed dizziness, a feeling that’s almost blissful, overtakes Mickey’s conscious mind.

He rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand and looks up again at Ian, wondering if the mix of edibles and tequila shots is hitting him harder than he’d anticipated. But Ian’s still there, moving to the throbbing beat of whatever Europop dance shit is playing.

“Ay, yo. You see a tall red-headed idiot bustin’ a move over there?” Mickey nods in Ian’s direction and the blonde squints to get a better look, but only shrugs.

He reaches for his cell, dials Gallagher’s number, and he answers. “Hey, Mick. You alright?” Ian’s lips move in sync with the voice that comes through the line and Mickey immediately ends the call. Is he using the right fucking phone this time? _Shit_ , he can’t even tell anymore.

It’s not long before Mickey catches Ian’s eye and he saunters over, looking all kinds of mussed and sexy in an immaculately tailored dark suit with strands of loose red hair falling into his eyes.

How is this possible? Mickey nudges Ian in the shoulder — solid, fleshy, all too real to be a figment of his imagination.

“Whaddyu doing here?” Mickey demands and Ian shrugs.

“Where else would I be?” his expression is arrogant, but there’s a cautious, almost wistful hesitance there, too. “Ready to get outta here, or—?”

The air’s too muggy, Mickey realizes just then. He shakes his head and inhales a deep breath. The terrace is too crowded and is that—is that _mist_ from a fucking fog machine? The pounding music sends vibrations clear through his chest and he feels his equilibrium come dangerously close to fraying.

“Mickey, do you need us to—” the blonde girl starts, but he doesn’t stick around long enough to let her finish and cuts a path through the crush of sweaty bodies writhing under the demonic lights and shrieking music.

Mickey approaches a staircase and climbs it, taking two steps at a time, ’til he reaches the top level of the house, which is an architectural behemoth made entirely of glass spread over the steep cliffs of a mountain range.

It’s not Ian. It _fucking_ isn’t. He keeps trying to convince himself of that as he looks down at the desert landscape below, dark and still with only moonlight casting long shadows over the windswept foothills. He lights a cigarette, pulls on it deeply and shuts his eyes trying to calm down a bit, but then there’s a hand on his arm.

He spins around to find himself face to face with the man he simultaneously loves and hates with every fiber of his being. Feeling laid out and bare under Ian’s gaze, unable to find the words to break the surreal impasse they find themselves in, Mickey just laughs at him bitterly.

“What do you fucking _want_ from me?”

Ian smiles, slow and apologetic. There’s an awkward silence then, and Mickey swallows hard, avoiding the heavy, sullen weight of Ian’s gaze. He spits before taking another slow drag off his cigarette.

“You killed me when you left, you know that?” he says to Ian, his broken voice sounding hollow in his own ears with an accompanying sigh that’s breathless and unsteady. “You know that, right? I’m here. I’m all on my fucking own and I’m just… I’m dead, man. You fu—you fucking killed me.”

Ian tips his head, a lightness coming to his eyes though the gravity of his expression remains.

“What can I do to make you wanna live again?”

Mickey scoffs and tries shouldering past him. It’s all a kind of foggy, dimly lit blur after that as Ian shifts to stand in his way. Before Mickey can figure out what he’s doing, he’s flicking away his cigarette and taking a vicious swing at Ian’s jaw. The other man sidesteps the blow easily, catches Mickey by the wrist and wrenches his arm, hyperextending it painfully before sending him crashing to the ground.

“Pull your fucking self together,” Paolo snarls, looking down at him from aloft. “Who could fucking possibly be worth all of this?”

Mickey just lies there on his back, laughing like an asshole, thinking, _shit, man… you can’t even imagine._

**___**

It’s about a week after the party when Mickey begins to notice Paolo’s mansion fall into a weirdly unnatural silence. Though by no means a light sleeper, he’s at least vaguely aware of the nonstop fuss and commotion that normally starts up here every day around dawn. Between the buzz of gardening tools and plumbers clanging on 300-year-old pipes forever in a state of disrepair, there’s never a real moment without someone or something adding to all the white noise. So, when things slow down to where it’s just whispers of wind rustling the palm trees, Mickey finds himself completely unnerved by it.

It doesn’t take long for him to realize what’s changed. Paolo’s gone, and with him, the hive of activity and droves of hangers-on endlessly surging in and out of the place. He leaves no word or instructions, _shit_ not that Mickey would follow them anyway, but there’s been no move to toss his ass out either, so it’s a strange limbo he finds himself in.

When curiosity finally gets the better of Mickey, he sends Paolo a text asking where he’s fucked off to. He doesn’t respond but about an hour later there’s a knock on Mickey’s door. A woman wearing a business suit, claiming to be Paolo’s assistant greets him curtly, before handing him a tablet.

“The fuck’s this?”

“Controls for the home automation systems,” she says, hurriedly swiping a finger over the touchscreen to demonstrate. “Lets you turn the lights on and off from pretty much anywhere on the property, lock and unlock any room, activate and keep an eye on the security systems.”

Despite the perplexed look on Mickey’s face, she continues as if far too busy to have to stop and entertain any asinine questions.

“You wanna go somewhere? Feel free to take the Benz,” she offers, handing him a key fob, “it’s one of only about a hundred ever made, so… no better time to live out all your juvenile James Bond fantasies.”

She turns to leave but Mickey stops her, still at a loss. “Wait, hold up. So, he just left and wants me to do… what exactly?” he asks, gesturing to the items in his hands.

The assistant shrugs. “He’ll be gone for about a month. Field visits to his properties in Macau, Bahrain, the Maldives. That means you’re ‘home alone,’ McCauley Culkin. Try not to get into too much trouble.”

Mickey scoffs when she leaves and murmurs a quiet “whatever,” under his breath before tossing the devices onto his kitchen counter.

___

It takes some getting used to but after a while, Mickey begins letting go of the whole skittish houseguest thing and allows himself to enjoy a bit of this unhurried new lifestyle. Over the next few weeks, he spends most his time hanging out in the game room or by the pool, lifting weights and chain smoking on his balcony. His spirits don’t exactly soar every time he walks into an elaborate room or a long stately hallway. Sure, it’s nice, but he doesn’t actually give a shit that only the finest, rarest materials line every door, wall and floor tile of the place.

On his own with nothing to do here but reflect and think _is_ having an unexpected effect on him, though. Because for the first time in a long while, Mickey gets a chance to bypass the struggle to simply exist without suffocating under the weight of dread and gloom and self-loathing. Not having to worry about engineering the downfall of a criminal organization, hustling to make ends meet or scoring his next fix, is… well _shit,_ he can’t say it’s the world’s worst feeling.

And yeah, the lavish setting is nice. Having world-class chefs make all his meals, even nicer. But more than anything, what shifts for Mickey is the prospect of replacing misery and loss with something that almost seems buoyant and maybe even a little hopeful. The sobering events of the last few months also get a chance to replay themselves over and over in Mickey’s head, joined now by prospects he’d never before allowed himself to think about. Lying out by the pool one night, staring up into the dark, cloudless sky and puffing on a joint, he can’t help but consider all that he’s been failing to value or appreciate. The past still haunts him, enough that it stands between him and anyone else, enough that it tamps down any feelings he might be developing. It leaves him in a weird fucking place though, and so he lies there blowing out plumes of smoke that linger in the dry desert air, as he struggles to make sense of it.

___

When Paolo finally returns from his trip and has a chance to settle in, he’s surprised to find Mickey, arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the doorway to his office.

“So, um… listen,” Mickey begins, looking as raw and vulnerable as Paolo’s ever seen him. He clears his throat and takes a deep breath. “I—uh, I think I’m ready to tell you about Ian.”


	5. Chapter 5

Paolo listens to Mickey’s story. South Side thuggery meets Shakespearean tragedy with a whole lot of deadbeats, sex workers and homophobic trash cast in the roles of supporting players. He lights a cigarette and leans back in his chair. None of it surprises him, not really. To learn that Mickey Milkovich, a dirt-poor hustler struggling to escape circumstance has someone in his past he’d gladly lay down his life and kill for? Sounds perfectly on-brand _and_ would certainly explain a lot of recent batshit behavior.

“Why you telling me all this?”

“Figured you had a right to know. All things considered.”

Paolo’s only response is to hum, his amused blue eyes darting between the lit end of his cigarette and the ashtray on his desk.

“You’ve, um… put up with a lot of my shit since we met. Seen me at my worst… to put it mildly,” Mickey says, momentarily flashing a small, self-deprecating smile. “Maybe, I dunno. Maybe it’s time for me to start considering a different path for myself.”

“So… then, what? No more deathwish as your primary lifegoal?”

Mickey doesn’t sneer or roll his eyes but instead, moves to sit down in the chair in front of Paolo’s desk and lights a cigarette before resuming the conversation.

“Somethin’ like that. I guess.”

“Glad to hear it,” the other man responds dryly, then pauses to flip open his laptop. “I’ll be honest with you, Milkovich. Wasn’t really expecting you to still be here when I got back. As far as the Sinaloa Cartel is concerned, you’ve vanished into the ether. No real reason for you to be sticking around anymore.”

“Yeah, about that…” Mickey clears his throat, “um, what if I said I wanted to stay?”

“You gonna start paying rent?”

“Go fuck yourself, man,” he snorts rudely before scratching and readjusting himself through his sweatpants.

Paolo smirks, then glances again at the laptop screen. As he taps his fingers over the keypad, cigarette dangling from his lips, the computer’s soft glow illuminates the tendrils of smoke that briefly obscure his features. He leans back in his chair again, looks Mickey up and down. Shit, they _really_ did break the fucking mold when they made this one.

“So, you and Ian? That definitely over with?”

Mickey shrugs. “Don’t really see two ways about it.”

“May I ask what brought this on? This… sudden change of life trajectory.”

Mickey takes a moment to draw in a lungful of smoke and tilts his head back when he exhales. “I dunno, man,” he finally admits, “I guess hallucinating your ex into existence might qualify as a come-to-Jesus moment for some people.”

“Interesting choice of words.”

“Hmm… why’s that?”

Paolo grinds out his cigarette, folds his hands in front of him and sighs. Mickey doesn’t know about Ian, does he? Hasn’t heard about the whole ‘Gay Jesus’ thing even though it’s been in the news for weeks now. Seriously, protecting this reckless South Side asshole from himself has become a full-time responsibility and he sighs again, knowing he’ll probably live to regret what he’s about to say next.

“If you found out that you weren’t the only one spiraling after your breakup, would it help you feel, I dunno, not so fucked up over the way things ended?”

“Spiraling?” Mickey’s eyebrows shoot up as Paolo gazes at him steadily, keeping his hands folded on the desk. 

“Turns out, your boy Gallagher’s become something of a cult leader in Chicago,” he says and swivels the laptop around to show Mickey an article about Ian. “Videos of him’ve been trending on YouTube for a while now, and then, ‘Gay Jesus’ over here fire-bombed the fuck out of a van right out in public.”

Mickey blinks hard before his eyes settle on the computer screen. It takes him a minute to read the story, and even less than that for his heart to lurch into his stomach at seeing an image of Ian, fist in the air, as a fiery inferno rages behind him.

“This is more than spiraling,” he chokes out, trying keep his voice steady, “this right here is a psychotic fucking episode.”

Paolo shuts the laptop and crosses the room to fetch a bottled water, then uncaps it before handing it to Mickey.

“Wasn’t sure it was the same guy, but from everything you just told me… seems like the actions of someone who might’ve gone off his meds.”

“Jesus, fuck.” Mickey shuts his eyes and singes his hand on the forgotten cigarette smoldering between his fingers. “Fuck, _fuck_!”

“You alright?”

“Do I look alright?” he snaps back, a bit harsher than he intends, sending water sloshing over the neck of the bottle and onto the carpet. 

Paolo wants to make a crack about how he’s _only_ ever seen Mickey this agitated and surly, but thinks better of it, given that the levity of a few minutes ago is likely all but gone between them. But he had to tell him, right? His eyes flick down and come to rest on Mickey’s. He sniffs and shakes his head, knowing that his next best move would be to diffuse and walk away from the situation.

“Ya know what, Mick? I’m actually pretty jetlagged,” he confesses, idly scratching the back of his neck. “We okay to pick this shit up later?”

Mickey nods and puts out his cigarette. He barely registers another word Paolo says, considering it all comes through as garbled noise anyway, nor the quick squeeze he gives his shoulder on his way out of the office.

__

It’s early the next day when Mickey comes barreling into the gym to find Paolo, three reps deep into a set of bench presses.

“Gotta talk to you.”

“Can it wait?” the other man grinds out, his back arching slightly off the bench.

“Not fucking really. I need your help with something. I’m gonna turn myself in to the Feds so I can be with Ian.”

Paolo continues grunting inattentively through another set of arm extensions, while Mickey unleashes a whole diatribe about how he’d spent most of the night reading up on the case, the indictment, the sentencing and where Ian’ll be serving his time. When he’s met with nothing but silence by the time he’s done ranting, Mickey flips his shit.

“You hear anything I just said?” he erupts, tossing a hand towel at Paolo’s chest.

“Yeah, I heard you,” the other man grunts back, tightening his grip around the heavily weighted bar until his knuckles go white and the veins bulge in his forearms, “just waiting for the punchline is all.”

“Fuck you, man. I’m serious.”

After a brief staring match, Paolo scoffs, rests the barbell on its rack and looks away for a moment to catch his breath.

“Be honest, Milkovich. Is the guesthouse too nice for you? Woulda set up a cot for you in the dungeon had I known your preference for confined, dreary spaces.”

Mickey groans. There’s no way he can begin to express the panic and worry he’s feeling right now, all wrapped up in a crippling desperation to be with Ian again. As scarily nihilistic as he can be, the fiercely protective side of Mickey paled right the fuck in comparison. It was instinctual and all-consuming and there was no fucking point in trying to find reason in any of it.

“Look, I can’t— _he_ can’t…” Mickey stammers out, then steels himself with a deep breath. “I can’t live knowing he’s in there alone and I that I’m out here and that I could’ve done something to protect him but didn’t.”

Paolo tugs on the tank top sweat-plastered to his body as he sits up and drapes the towel around his neck. The unexpectedly raw emotion radiating from Mickey is what finally prompts him to stop, however reluctantly, and accept the gravity of what he’s saying.

“Mick, I get that your heart’s in the right place, but…” he trails off sensing the need to try another tack, then issues a heavy sigh and says, “Okay look, you’re too smart and resourceful to throw your life away like this. That fucking idea you had for the fuel taps?” Paolo shrugs and nods his head at Mickey reverently. “It’s early days yet, but that shit’s already made this organization a fortune.”

Mickey looks down and crosses his arms defiantly as Paolo continues pleading his case. “You liked those hot springs we toured, right? I know you did. Why not help me develop that land, then run the thing once it’s built? _Or,_ let’s get you the hell outta Mexico altogether and set you up on one of our island properties. Someplace warm, on a beach where everyone speaks English…”

Paolo stands up and takes a cautious step forward, then abruptly stops when Mickey shakes his head and backs away, putting distance between them.

“No,” he says firmly, leaving no room for argument. “I’m sorry.”

A long silence stretches between them before Paolo speaks again, spreading his hands apart at the futility of the situation. “So, what the fuck help you need from me, then? Hmm.”

“Protection. In the joint,” Mickey clears his throat and swallows thickly, “I’m gonna need it because when I flip—"

“When you _flip_?” Paolo echoes, vibrating with rage and glaring coldly into Mickey’s eyes. This insufferable shit stain is actually prepared to go in, half-cocked, playing white-knight heroics, never mind the consequences involved.

“When I flip,” Mickey starts again, holding up a conciliatory hand, “and turn state’s evidence on the Sinaloa Cartel and help dismantle that whole criminal fucking enterprise with what I know, that’ll open up huge territories for the Gulf Cartel. All the way up to Cuidad Juarez in the north, Guadalajara in the south and Las—"

“I don’t need a fucking geography lesson from you,” Paolo seethes, fists clenching until they strain painfully against the wraps binding them. “What you’re proposing is fucking madness.”

“Look, man, I get it. When we met, I was in a really dark place and you helped me. You helped me a lot. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

“You’re an escaped con plotting a way back into prison, Mick. Hate to break it to you, but you’re still fucking in one.”

The morning’s workout is effectively over, Paolo decides, tearing the tape off his hands with his teeth and shoulder-checking Mickey hard enough to send him stumbling as he exits the gym.

___

The powerful blast of a shotgun jolts Mickey awake and he instinctively reaches for his 9 mm after tumbling out of bed. He glares out the window trying to identify the origin of the blast, but then it’s followed by another, shaking him to the core once again. With his pistol drawn, Mickey bolts out of the guesthouse and suddenly, two more earsplitting shots ring out, _bang_ _,_ _bang_ _._ Mickey rolls his eyes and sighs deeply into the morning air, watching as two clay pigeons break apart and splinter into small shards over the manicured lawns below.

He strolls down to the far end of the compound where Paolo’s discharging casings and reloading a double-barreled shotgun while a member of his security detail operates a target launcher. At Mickey’s approach, the man signals for Paolo to lower his gun and click on the safety.

“Put those on,” Paolo instructs, gesturing to a spare set of goggles and earmuffs, then readies the gun once more, butting it against his shoulder.

Mickey puts on the safety gear and two more clays release from the launcher. Paolo shoots in rapid succession, then another two and another two, all of which shatter magnificently above their heads.

“Pick a day yet for when you’re gonna turn yourself in?” he asks Mickey after collecting the spent casings and resting his firearm gently on a nearby gunrack.

“Today, I thought,” Mickey replies, removing his safety gear and tossing it on the grass by his feet, “just have to get to the nearest U.S. embassy. Try and bargain out a deal for myself.”

Paolo scoffs, “and then what? You expect the Feds to be so moved by this tragic thugged-out love story of yours, that they’ll just set you two up in the same prison cell?”

He motions for the security guard to take a walk so that he and Mickey can continue speaking in private. 

“They gotta ensure Gallagher’s safety, right? They’re not just gonna make some random felon his cellmate ’cause he asks nicely. In fact, for all they know, you might have a score to settle with Gallagher and could just be tryin’ to get close enough to waste his ass in the joint. Whole plan could backfire on you if they decide to put you in two separate prisons. Then, you’d really be fucked.”

 _Shit. He’s got a point_ , Mickey realizes and swallows convulsively, while the other man goes about collecting more bullet casings from the ground.

“He’ll be serving time at Beckman Correctional, yes?” Paolo waits for Mickey to nod before continuing. “Luckily for you both, we’ve got associates all over that facility not to mention significant pull with the administrators. When the Feds ask, all you tell ’em is that you’ll roll on the Sinaloa Cartel _on_ the condition they house you at Beckman ’cause you got family nearby. That’s all. The rest, you leave to me.”

“So, you’re on board with this?”

“Have you given me a choice?” Paolo replies dryly, removing his safety gear and counting the shells that remain in his box of ammo before shutting the lid.

With no further words exchanged, he begins making his way back toward the house and Mickey falls in step behind him, appearing deep in thought as light winds and chirping cicadas stir the property’s verdant landscape. When they pass the wrought iron gates approaching Mickey’s residence, he stops Paolo in his tracks.

“Hold up, I gotta give you something,” he calls out, hurrying into the guesthouse and returning moments later carrying a Ziploc bag.

Paolo examines its contents with a scowl on his face, realizing that Mickey just handed him what looks like a bag of shattered glass.

“This broken pile of shit all for me? Mick, you shouldn’t have.”

Mickey rolls his eyes and exhales heavily. “It’s a murder weapon, man. Need you to hang onto it for me.”

“Fucking ’course you do,” Paolo snorts and heads into the main house. “Get dressed. I’ll drive you to the embassy myself after breakfast.”

___

On the ride over, Mickey explains the backstory behind the smashed paperweight he’d given Paolo, who agrees to stash it in his safe once he gets home. And, apart from some cash he’d like added to his commissary funds, the rest of his belongings, Mickey tells him, he can either toss or wipe his ass with, his choice.

A short while later, they’re pulling up beside a small red building near the town’s center and Paolo kills the engine before reaching into his jacket for a pack of cigarettes.

It really is beautiful out, he realizes, cupping a hand to shield his lighter from the morning’s cool westerly breezes, but Milkovich is determined on making this his own personal doomsday, so here’s how the fuck they’ll be spending it.

“One last smoke before you piss your life away completely?” Paolo asks with a smirk, to which Mickey snorts and rolls his eyes.

“Sure. Why the fuck not.”

Soon enough, both of their cigarettes are creating thick wisps of smoke that swirl in the air between them.

Paolo lifts his chin and shrugs. “Look, I know there’s nothing I can do or say to talk you outta this,” he says bluntly, resting his free hand on the steering wheel. “Just… be good in there, okay?”

“I will.”

The two lock eyes for a moment and then Mickey’s looking away, staring unseeingly out of the passenger-side window.

“Also, you should know, they’re gonna try and give Ian generic meds in the joint,” Paolo sits up straighter in his seat. “Don’t let ’em. Once you’re on the inside, you’ll both have access to better things.”

“Alright.”

“And, if there’s anything you need,” Paolo sighs and looks pointedly at Mickey, “anything _he_ needs. Just say the word.”

Mickey takes a long drag off his cigarette and shakes his head, genuinely confused by the shift in attitude.

“You’d do that for him? Why?”

Paolo doesn’t answer right away and instead, lets the silence linger between them until he eventually tilts his head back and says, quite simply, “you know why.”

Mickey sighs. The unexpected candor hits him deeply and he rubs a hand over his face, unsure how to respond to it, then there’s another moment of quiet before Paolo speaks again.

“I could circle the world twice. Shit, Mick, I _have_ circled the world twice. There’ll never be another one like you. I hope he knows that.”

Mickey bites back a smile as he glances at Paolo whose got a tense set to his jaw. “Guess we’ll find out,” he mumbles and draws in a quick breath before stepping out of the car.

After savoring one final drag, Mickey flicks away his cigarette and heads toward the building’s entrance. It catches them both by surprise when he turns back and leans down beside the driver’s window so that Paolo can see his face. 

“I know it was you and not your goons who spared me the day that I got caught, and that afterward, you only used intel I gave you when you were sure it wouldn’t lead back to me,” Mickey says, then before he can overthink it, hastens to add, “If you weren’t such a dick all the time, who’d even believe you were real?”

“Ditto,” Paolo shoots back with a wink, his tone smug and laced with amusement.

He watches as Mickey disappears into the entrance of the embassy building, allowing whatever he’s experiencing in the moment to escape with a heavy sigh, leaving only a feeling of resignation to endure. The car roars loudly when he revs the engine, then peels out smoothly as he downshifts and pulls away from the curb.

___

“Mickey, what is this?” Ian demands, holding up a lumbar support pillow in one hand while shoving Mickey against the wall of their prison cell with the other.

“The fuck’s it look like?” Mickey pushes back, lips quirked into a small grin.

“Where’d it come from, is what I mean. I casually mention that my back’s been hurting, and this just somehow appears… like it’s nothing?” Ian shakes his head in disbelief. “I mean, we’re in prison for fuck’s sake.”

“You don’t want it? Could always send it back,” Mickey shrugs and fumbles for the pillow, which Ian promptly snatches back and away from his reach.

“No, it’s awesome. It’s just, are you… you know, like fucking other people in exchange for stuff?”

There’s a second of stunned silence before Mickey barks out a laugh that has him nearly doubling over.

“Gallagher, gimme a fucking break,” he manages to huff out, beyond amused by the accusation. “You really think I could barter my ass for contraband in here?”

“Oh, I fucking _know_ you could.” Ian’s voice is low and rough as his eyes rake over Mickey’s face with an intensity that makes the latter’s pulse quicken.

Ian places the pillow on the top bunk, then bends down to retrieve more items from the black grocery bag at his feet. After rummaging through and finding pain-relief gel and moisturizing eye drops, Ian’s hand settles on a small box of drugstore chocolates, making him tip his head and blink curiously at Mickey.

“Okay, then. If you’re not messing around on me, who gave you these? Hmm?” Ian waggles the box at Mickey before shifting the full weight of his body against him and pinning him once more to the wall.

The look in Ian’s eyes is deadly as he wraps a hand around Mickey’s throat, but the erection poking through his jumpsuit tells a different story.

“They’re for you, dumbass,” Mickey presses up against Ian’s hand just enough to lay a kiss on his lips. “Thought that’d be obvious.”

Sensing that his boyfriend still needs more convincing, Mickey rests a hand on Ian’s hip and gives it an affectionate squeeze.

“Look, man, I’m a Milkovich, alright? Detention centers, correctional facilities… this is where my people thrive. Why question any of it?”

Reluctantly, Ian loosens his grip to set the chocolates aside, then resumes his invasion of Mickey’s personal space. He stares at Mickey, who only blinks back at him looking cool and impassive.

It’s been a few weeks now since their reunion at Beckman and Ian still can’t believe Mickey’s really here with him. It could explain why he’ll use any excuse to touch Mickey, why at night, he crawls into the bottom bunk pressing up so close, it’s like he’s trying to meld their bodies together. It makes Ian’s chest tighten to think about anything coming between them again, ’cause second chances are a fucking rarity in life and the one he’s been given with Mickey is about as precious to him as air at this point.

It isn’t long before Ian breaks eye contact to make a rough grab for Mickey’s jumpsuit, smiling as he tears open the snaps and pulls the material down far enough to expose his boxers.

“Man, what are you doing?” Mickey sighs, even though all things considered, it does seem like dumb question which is why Ian doesn’t respond and simply drops to his knees.

“In broad daylight, Ian? We’re gonna get caught— _oh shit_ ,” his protests are immediately stifled by the wet heat that envelopes the full length of him.

“I can be quick,” Ian murmurs and gazes up at Mickey, his eyes bright and full of mischief. Mickey loves seeing him this way. Relaxed, blissed out, carefree even. He huffs out a small laugh, then despite himself, runs his fingers encouragingly through Ian’s hair.

“All this for a back pillow, huh? You got a thing for medical-grade orthopedics, Gallagher?”

“I got a thing for you, Shithead.”

A small smile turns up the corners of Mickey’s mouth. Not for the first time, he wonders if he’s dreaming or maybe even dead, the result of one too many close calls in Mexico and what’s followed has all been the product of delusion. The entire scenario, being here with Ian, getting midday head like he’s in some fucking prison porno, seems too mindboggling to really be happening.

He shuts his eyes and reaches a hand down so he can lace his fingers through Ian’s. He lets his own head fall back against the wall, as he savors the strong, purposeful strokes Ian’s using to work him over. The blowjob is sloppy and fast and everything Ian knows Mickey likes.

“Hey,” Ian gasps, withdrawing for a second to lift his eyes up and meet Mickey’s. “Look at me.”

Mickey obediently casts his gaze down to find that Ian’s expression is burning with intensity but there’s something else there too, something raw and emotional, just beneath the surface.

“I love you.”

Mickey’s breath stutters and he shuts his eyes again.

“None of this shit matters to me, Mickey. Just you.”

Ian’s not expecting an answer, which is good considering Mickey can’t really form words right now, and accepts his boyfriend’s nod and quick hand squeeze as a sign of mutualism, before diving back in.

It feels natural and it feels right as Ian lets his mind wander to a fantasy where they’re just a normal couple with jobs having easy banter and great sex, about to head out to lunch in a few minutes. Ian hasn’t let himself imagine anything like this, anything so idealistic in years, but here they are doing just that. 

Watching Mickey unravel above him is amazing. Quietly grunting in an insanely erotic display as he comes closer to orgasm, Mickey’s back bows off the wall and he goes rigid. Then he leans forward, chasing the building pressure while Ian strokes him through it, cheeks hollowed and fingers curled up tightly with Mickey’s. His next exhale comes out heavy and he twitches through pulse after pulse of his release. Ian wants to linger beneath him, bask in Mickey’s post-orgasmic bliss, but the sound of approaching footsteps yanks both men gracelessly out of the moment.

Ian springs up and wipes his mouth while Mickey tucks his still-leaking dick away with seconds to spare before the door to their cell slides open.

Standing there is a CO delivering mail, who Mickey ignores considering Ian’s the only one of them who ever gets letters, mostly from his idiot disciples around the country.

“Thanks.” Ian quickly rifles through the envelopes in his hands, then comes to a postcard for Mickey that has no return address on it.

“What’s this?” Ian asks, waving the card at Mickey who gives it a brief glance before shaking his head.

“It’s nothing. Go ahead and throw it away.”

“The stamp’s got a Mexican postmark on it. Is it… is it some kinda message? From the cartel?”

Mickey sighs at the frisson of panic in Ian’s voice and wastes no time placing both his hands comfortingly on his boyfriend’s shoulders. “No, no. It’s nothing like that at all.”

He goes on to explain the postcard’s significance to him. How it’d hung on the wall of his cell at Cooke County and that he’d kept it to remind himself of Ian — leaving out the part about how even if he’d tried burning memories of him away with a blowtorch, he wouldn’t’ve been able. 

“Oh, well that’s actually kinda touching, Mickey. Who sent it?”

“I dunno, probably my last landlord?” Mickey shrugs, feigning indifference. “Just toss that shit, man. Seriously.”

“Nah,” Ian smiles and ducks out of the cell, returning a few seconds later with a roll of tape. “Borrowed it from the Carloses,” he explains to Mickey who nods in understanding, considering those two had the jailhouse equivalent of an art supply shop going on in their cell.

After fixing the postcard to the wall beside one of his own drawings, Ian beams at Mickey. “Lunch?”

“Or something like it, sure.”

They kiss. Ian cradles Mickey’s face while rubbing a thumb over his stubbled cheek, before breaking apart and heading off with him toward the mess hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading. All feedback is very much appreciated!
> 
> Let’s talk all things Gallavich: https://mzshko.tumblr.com/


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